Jon Peterson’s day starts at 5 a.m. He milks the 55 organic dairy cows at his farm near (aptly named) Peterson, Minn., while his son collects the eggs from their 2,300 organic hens. Both the milk and the eggs will be picked up by the Organic Valley Co-op and transported from their farm, which is tucked amongst rolling green hills along the Root River. It’s hard to imagine subdivisions, or a thousand-head livestock farm, or a frac-sand mine leering up through the morning mist of the surrounding landscape. But these enterprises are a potential part of this region’s changing landscape and, in the early 1990s, Peterson was feeling these pressures on his farm as well as his father’s neighboring farm to an alarming degree.